Sailing can be exhilarating. A 20-mile-per-hour wind pushes everything – crew, boat, sails, hardware – to the limit.

But there are other days when the breeze simply dies. If you’re out for a leisurely sail, then no problem. Just crank up the engine. However, if it happens during a race, you can find yourself sitting dead in the water, or worse… going backward with the tide.

A friend of mine was in this exact situation when the skipper called on the crew to lower the anchor. As they scurried about the deck appearing to look busy with the sails, the other boats slowly slipped behind them, floating backward.

In a sense, my friend’s boat gained ground by going nowhere.

The Fed governors have done the same. For all of their talk, they’ve moved ahead by not floating backward with the pack.

Over the last two years, four central banks in Europe did something that was once unthinkable. When their zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) didn’t work, they went lower. They moved interest rates into negative territory, introducing a negative interest rate policy (NIRP).

The European Central Bank (ECB), along with the central banks of Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland, all charge large depositors to hold cash.

This might seem backwards, because it is. Theoretically, depositors who don’t want to pay the fees could withdraw all of their cash from banks, thereby escaping them.

But that doesn’t work in the real world.

While the average Joe might be able to shut down his checking account, it’s a bit tougher for IBM, Caterpillar, or New York Life Insurance to do the same thing.

Cash management is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Huge sums are moved daily to meet endless obligations, from payroll to bond payments. There’s no way for entities as large as these to avoid, or even minimize, their interactions with the banking system.

So, even though it flies in the face of the modern banking relationship, they pay the fees.